MUSIC REVIEW : Belated Xenakis Premieres at UC San Diego Fest

For all its theoretical bases and mathematical origins, the music of Iannis Xenakis often seems to offer little more than density, chaos and harshness. Those who love it do so for those qualities, no doubt.

It was no surprise, then, that the mini-retrospective of the composer’s works on the second concert program of a weeklong Xenakis festival at UC San Diego--works created between 1975 and 1982--specialized in those elements.

In the past decade, Neo-Romanticism and Minimalism and the widespread return to simple chord-progressions have changed our perspectives. Today, after the polite and non-threatening compositional attitudes--some would say wimpiness--of Glass and Adams, Xenakis’ aggressive noise-making can seem highly attractive, like the entrance, into a roomful of yuppies, of an honest brute.

Xenakis is precisely that. The 67-year old Greco-French composer--in some circles he is refered to first as a mathematician and architect, second as a music maker--has worked at the edge of the avant-garde so long that his connection to the mainstream of musical thought has been forgotten, repeatedly. He is a major figure, and we ignore him. Yet he continues to create.

The three works receiving United States premieres on this Saturday night program in Mandeville Auditorium proclaimed their author’s ingenuity and seriousness.

“Ais” (1980), a quarter-hour cry of pain--the subject is death--for large orchestra and baritone and percussion soloists, disturbs the listener on a gut and heart level, not on a plane of textual or intellectual communication, since, as usual, the composer eschews word-setting for syllable-manipulation.

But the disturbance is real, especially as wailed, moaned and yelled by Philip Larson, with Steven Schick the virtuosic percussionist. Thomas Nee conducted the La Jolla Civic/University Symphony with the same clarity he might bring to Mozart; the players of the ensemble responded authoritatively.

Earlier, Larson was soloist, with pianist Alan Feinberg his collaborator, in “Pour Maurice” (1982), written as a 50th birthday tribute to Maurice Fleuret. It is brief, pithy and painfully dissonant. Feinberg also offered the U.S. premiere of “a r. (Hommage a Ravel), a busy toccata barely two minutes long.

The pre-intermission works were “Psappha,” a complex percussion showpiece for Schick, who made it an heroic display; the noisy and grating “Mycenes Alpha,” for electronic tape and abstract film, and “N’Shima,” a septet for singers, horns, trombones and cello.

The festival ends tonight.